Intel Capital is the lead investor in a $20m funding round for Jajah, the internet telephony software firm. Intel is pumping in $15m to help Jajah in its goal to supplant Skype as the mass-market VoIP provider of choice, the company said today.

NASA has moved into extra-solar planetary weather forecasting. Well, mapping, but one has to start somewhere. Researchers using the agency's Spitzer infrared space telescope have mapped the weather patterns of two extremely hot, distant planets.

Software 2007Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hawked Office Business Applications during his keynote at the Software 2007 conference, but conceded during a Q&A session that the company's best-known OBA, called Duet, has not made the progress desired, given the time invested in it.

JavaOneSun is seeking developers outside the "Java rank and file" to join the Java Community Process (JCP) standards body. The company is eying up content authors and scripting developers as JCP recruits to deliver feedback and drive platform and language changes.

ColumnHarry the Rottweiler puts down his corporate-branded coffee cup next to his spiral-bound Book of Names and cheap plastic retractable (which also doubles as a sacrificial weapon in extreme management meetings).

'Electronic paper' developer E Ink yesterday paved the way for bigger, brighter displays for almost any handheld gadget you can think of - all consuming a tiny fraction of the power today's LCDs do and all able to continue showing information even when the power is cut.

ColumnI have a useful hot air detector. It listens for two or three keywords and marks the output of anybody using them as suspect. For example, "video conferencing", or "artificial intelligence", or "cheap fusion power".

For once here comes a digital protection technology designed to stop shoplifters rather than prevent consumers copying content. US-based Kestrel Wireless this week announced a plan to make DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs unplayable until they've been purchased.

Motorola will next week take the wraps off a phone capable of showing "full-motion" Hollywood movies, the company's chief said yesterday, though he went some way from promising a true personal media player experience.

It's the ideal games console for anyone who's too kack-handed to be any good at games: Microsoft's Homer Simpson-styled limited edition Xbox 360 Pro, announced today to tie in with this summer's The Simpsons Movie.

As the UK's political class tots up Tony Blair's scorecard, there's one area where New Labour hasn't made much progress: Whitehall still feels compelled to organise summits to ask how we can all turn the UK into the world's greatest knowledge econonmy.

A second LCD TV for the bedroom, sir? With this little 'un from Evesham you won't be stuck for stuff to watch. There's a Freeview digital tuner. And a DVD player. And a Flash drive-friendly USB port. And a three-in-one memory card reader.

Joost; the peer-to-peer video service developed by those behind Skype, has raised $45m from Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and the Li Ka Shing Foundation, to "...accelerate product development, global expansion, localization, and service offerings".

First shown at CeBIT, as we reported a couple of months back, Mio's new satnavs, the C320, C520 and C520t are now available in the UK along with a new variation, the C320t. All of them sport a 4.3in widescreen display and split-screen view.

Research conducted by Screen Digest for Microsoft suggests that there is a target audience of around 230 million people that might consider buying into IPTV or another pay TV service in seven top TV countries, and the software giant reckons that 75 million of them say they would switch TV suppliers if they have the right features and channels, especially those features, such as the DVR, which help people get back control of viewing times in their busy lives.

Joost and Babelgum are two new start-ups that deliver TV-quality streaming to broadband-connected PCs. They're so similar it's hard not to think of them as Tweedlegum and Tweedlejoost. But already there are signs which one has the better prospects of success.

DW BlogWith release 3.1 of its Celona migration tool, Celona Technologies claims to be a step nearer providing complete automation of data migration projects. At the same time, it plans to extend its patent migration technology to a broader business market.

Hewlett-Packard sort of announced its data warehouse appliance (if that is the right term—see later) last autumn. The company refers to this as a soft launch in the sense that they didn't talk much about it except to a few beta clients. Well, now it has had its hard launch (which is officially version 2.0) and the company is going to be talking about it much more widely.

Lenovo will pay up to $1.3bn over the next year to pre-install Microsoft software on its computers. Of course, it is not really doing the paying: it is a Microsoft OEM and so is reselling passing the costs on, along with a little margin for itself, to its customers. So the more it pays Microsoft, the more it is making in PC sales and Office apps sell-throughs.